Critical-Material Recovery from U.S. Industrial Byproducts: A Scenario-Based Supply-Risk Analysis

Abstract

Recovery of critical materials from industrial byproducts is often presented as a near-term United States (U.S.) supply-security strategy, yet contained inventories, pilot output, announced capacity, and commercial production are not equivalent. This study evaluates eight U.S. pathways for gallium, germanium, tellurium, lithium, magnesium, and cobalt, classified as operational, demonstration/pilot, announced target-year, or technical upper-bound cases. Facility- and stream-specific quantities were converted to qualifying domestic output and incorporated into same-stage material balances under explicit assumptions for utilization, eligibility, demand, and import displacement. Supply risk was calculated from the net import dependence and governance-adjusted production and trade concentration using a geometric index, with arithmetic formulations as robustness checks. The operational U.S. copper-refining tellurium pathway yielded the largest central reduction (49.29%). Announced 2030 Clarksville capacity reduced modeled risk by 13.87% for gallium and 8.75% for germanium, conditional on project completion, feed attribution, product qualification, utilization, and demand. All other central cases produced reductions of 4.63% or less; the current lithium demonstration, Stillwater cobalt, and aluminum-residue magnesium cases had negligible national effects. Policy support should therefore be differentiated by qualifying output, market scale, project maturity, and evidence quality rather than by contained material or nameplate capacity alone.